Cat HicksFrom a behavioral and psychological perspective (not interested in this thread in an "arguing about whether our estimation is right" perspective lol), I think the halting, difficult, but clearly emerging work of starting to reckon with the climate costs of computing is so incredibly cool and important. Some questions I want research to ask about this include:
How does the relationship a developer has with the computing resources around them change when climate and ecology are brought into the picture? Does this produce unexpected other changes, for instance, I speculate without evidence that it might reframe your interactions with technology to be less abstract. Despite the massive crisis of climate concerns, is there a protective effect from this? Might this make some technology work feel less alienated from the world?
Dave Neary@grimalkina I would be interested in talking to you about this! The relationship between the developer and the hardware has become very eroded by datacenters and cloud. The only compute resource developers see every day is their laptop or workstation. And as a silicon vendor very interested in shifting the conversation to how much CO2 is generated by your application, there is a lot of abstraction & distance between the climate impact and the application - and what developers (and operations teams) can do to quantify and impact the carbon cost of an application.
Duclearc@dneary @grimalkina The Green Software foundation has an "Ecograder" to help with this very issue. It's like lighthouse for sustainability. It even gives you tips on which areas to improve. 👍